High-tech boot camps

‘When Central Massachusetts was a thriving industrial center, supplying the world with steel and shoes, it took monumental resources to found a new company,” Robert E. Johnson, president of Becker College, wrote in an article that appeared in the Telegram & Gazette in November. “With today’s technology, though, an individual can start the next Facebook, Apple or Microsoft with nothing more than a laptop and an innovative idea.”

Indeed, Facebook was founded in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard University, but he decided to take his fast-growing enterprise to California’s Silicon Valley because he felt Massachusetts lacked the “entrepreneurial ecosystem” that helps innovative talent reach its full potential. Smarting from that defection, Cambridge has learned a lesson: Today that city is the home of several business incubators designed to help promising local talent start and grow companies. Mr. Johnson calls them “entrepreneurial boot camps.”

During a recent interview, Timothy Loew, executive director of the successful Massachusetts Digital Games Institute based at Becker College, stressed the urgency of locating such an incubator in Worcester. He referred to an “overview statement” by a preliminary planning group: “In order to foster a regionwide culture of entrepreneurship, the growth of new ventures, the creation of new jobs and wealth, we propose to plan and support a downtown Worcester initiative to serve as a destination for emerging technology startups.”

Dean Hickey, vice president for institutional advancement at Becker, spoke of a young entrepreneur in Framingham who hopes to develop a promising idea into a startup business. “He has to drive to Cambridge every day for the kind of support he should enjoy closer to home,” he said.

Mr. Loew described MassChallenge, a nonprofit business incubator in Boston, a competitive arrangement backed by a network of mentors. Part of the support comes in the form of rent-free facilities valued at $1.6 million. The program accepts and evaluates 125 applications, and the best 26 receive funding. “In just a few years, MassChallenge accelerated 361 startups, created 2,912 jobs, raised $365.5 million for funding and generated $96.1 million in revenues, in addition to anchoring Boston’s Innovation/Seaport District,” Mr. Loew said. “Imagine what creating something — even if only a solid fraction — along similar lines would do for Worcester.”

The Worcester area has 30,000 students attending 12 institutions of higher education. “This may be the only area in New England that can claim so many world-class educational institutions, a strong infrastructure and, unlike Boston and Cambridge, a cost of living that is still reasonable,” Mr. Johnson said. “What we don’t have is sufficient mechanisms to retain the talent in that brain trust.”

“Competition never sleeps,” Mr. Hickey noted. “Today we don’t prepare students just for jobs. We educate them to be entrepreneurs as well, to be able to start new businesses. We try to teach them both job skills and entrepreneurial skills. Incubators help.”

City Manager Michael V. O’Brien likes business incubators: “They are organized, collaborative startup company efforts with shared space, equipment and overhead costs. They have the expertise on hand to navigate the learning curves of funding, management and growth. A great case study is our own Massachusetts Biomedical Initiative led by Kevin O’Sullivan: Small startup biotech firms that grow into miraculous cures for the world and to significant job generators for the city.”

The Massachusetts Small Business Development Center at Clark University has advocated the incubator concept. The center’s senior business adviser, Peter Marton, told a local business journal: “A lot of times, there’s a big leap a company takes when it moves out of the garage and into some outside space. It helps the owner legitimize the business, feel that it’s more serious, that it’s taken a small step toward legitimate success.”

In 2008 WPI students authored a feasibility study for a business incubator in Worcester, and the institute’s school of business and Tech Advisory Network has been promoting the “Startup Common” model, concluding that the city has much of what it takes to be a marketplace of entrepreneurial initiatives.

There are small private initiatives as well, such as “Running Start” on Lincoln Street, co-founded by Ryan Leary and two partners at Kennebec Holding Co. It provides services for budding entrepreneurs who work for themselves and need guidance to move ahead. Tenants pay a $250 monthly membership fee and can rent workstations and conference space.

“Today you don’t have to build a Norton Co. to succeed in business,” Mr. Loew said. “It can be done with a smartphone and a good idea. Today it costs one-tenth of what it took 10 years ago to start a new technology company. The time is right in Worcester for a business incubator. Let’s stop talking about it and enter the planning stage.”

Said City Manager O’Brien: “These incubators must be well-managed, stable and sustainable. They work best when partnered with higher education institutions. These partnerships come with a steady supply of graduate students and graduates with the specialties to further the ambitions, typically inexpensively, of those startup companies. The city is very supportive of such incubator ventures, and we are working now with two of our academic institutions on two separate and distinct proposals.”